Ethical Principles

To present an overview of universal normative approaches to bioethics, this chapter focuses on the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) (Universal Declaration of Bioethics and Human Rights, October 2005) and a universal theory of bioethics enunciated in what is referred to as Principlism (Beauchamp TL, Childress JF. Principles of biomedical ethics, 7th edn. Oxford University Press, New York, 2013). Bioethics emerged as a new discipline in the early1970s with Van Rensselaer Potter writing the first book on the subject. Potter describes bioethics as the combination of science and philosophy (Ten Have HAMJ. Kennedy Inst Ethics J. 22(1):59–82, 2012). Potter (Cancer Res. 35:2297–2306, 1975) defined bioethics as “a new discipline that combines biological knowledge with a knowledge of human value systems in an open-ended biocybernetic system of self-assessment.”